The Citizen: and the Making of 'City'

By Roy Fisher

When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’ All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781780375977

Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher (1930-2017) published over 30 poetry books, and was the subject of numerous critical essays and several studies, including The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson and John Kerrigan (Liverpool University Press, 2000), and of The Unofficial Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books, 2010). He published four books with Bloodaxe. The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (1996) was superseded by his later retrospective, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 (2005), and followed by Standard Midland (2010), published on his 80th birthday, which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. An expanded edition, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010 – including Standard Midland – was published in 2012. His first US Selected Poems, edited by August Kleinzahler, was published by Flood Editions in 2011. His final collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems (2016) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Peter Robinson's edition, The Citizen and the Making of 'City' (Bloodaxe Books, 2022) includes Fisher's early, previously unpublished prose work 'The Citizen', the precursor of 'City', with all three versions of that later sequence. Born in Handsworth, Birmingham, he retired as Senior Lecturer in American Studies from Keele University in 1982. He was also a jazz musician, and lived in the Derbyshire Peak District in his later years.

Book preview

1

ROY FISHER

THE CITIZEN

and the making of City

Edited by Peter Robinson

When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’

All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and Peter Robinson has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction.

By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher’s most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.

Cover photograph: Aston, Birmingham, 29 May 1957 by Phyllis Nicklin

© Phyllis Nicklin Archive, MLA West Midlands & the University of Birmingham

2

ROY FISHER (1958)

3

Roy Fisher

THE CITIZEN

and the making of City

EDITED BY

PETER ROBINSON

5

CONTENTS

Title Page

Note on Texts

Introduction

The Citizen(1959)

I

II

V

From a Citizen notebook (1960)

Five uncollected City poems (c. late 1950s)

The Fog at Birmingham

Midlanders

Sea Monster in Hospital Shed

Where We Are

Lost, Now

City(1961)

Preface

Introduction

Lullaby and exhortation for the unwilling hero –

The Place – The Day

The Entertainment of War

North Area

By the Pond

Toyland

The Judgment

The Hill behind the Town

The Poplars

Starting to Make a Tree

Coda

The Wind at Night

Do Not Remain Too Much Alone

Then Hallucinations: City II(1962)

CITY: Roy Fisher typescript (c. 1962-63)

Lullaby and Exhortation for the Unwilling Hero

The Entertainment of War

North Area

By the Pond

The Sun Hacks

Night Walkers

The Judgment

The Hill behind the Town

The Poplars

Starting to Make a Tree

The Wind at Night

The Park

City(1969)

Lullaby and Exhortation for the Unwilling Hero

The Entertainment of War

North Area

By the Pond

The Sun Hacks

The Hill behind the Town

The Poplars

Starting to Make a Tree

The Wind at Night

The Park

Notes

Roy Fisher’s published comments on City

Secondary Bibliography

Copyright

7

NOTE ON TEXTS

The following list offers an outline sequence for texts included here, as well as ones not included relating to City’s composition:

a. The Citizen

A hand-written prose text of 103 pages, some partially mutilated, in a blue hard-bound, unlined notebook, dated at the front November 1959. This is published in full below.

b. A Citizen notebook

A post-composition outline of the contents of The Citizen, the individual sections numbered to 117 and identified by names or short descriptions, though there are no more than numbers for sections 74 to 117. This is followed by two journal entries dated 10 and 11 November 1960. The journal entries are published below.

c. Poems included in the various versions of City

These are ‘A Lullaby and Exhortation for the Unwilling Hero’, ‘The Entertainment of War’, ‘North Area’, ‘By the Pond’, ‘The Sun Hacks, ‘Toyland’, ‘The Judgment’, ‘The Hill Behind the Town’, ‘The Poplars’, ‘Starting to Make a Tree’, ‘The Wind at Night’, ‘Do Not Remain Too Much Alone’ (including an 11-line coda by Michael Shayer), ‘Night Walkers’, and ‘The Park’. For details of their first publications, see the extracts from ‘Roy Fisher: A Bibliography’ by Derek Slade included in the Notes below.

d. Related poems not used in any versions of City

These are ‘Midlanders’, written on 12 January 1957 which first appeared in Mica (Fall 1961) and ‘Lost, Now’, written 8on 30 December 1960 and which appeared in Poetry and Audience c. 1961. ‘The Fog at Birmingham’, ‘Sea Monster in Hospital Shed’, and ‘Where We Are’ are not previously published and so not readily dateable, though all in existence before mid-1960, when referred to in correspondence. They are published here. Other related poems (‘Script City’, ‘Something Unmade’, ‘Results’, ‘Last Brief Maxims’, ‘After Midnight’, ‘Variations (on Bag’s Groove)’, ‘The Bachelors Stripped Bare by their Bride’, and ‘Division of Labour’ can be found in Slakki: New & Neglected Poems (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2016), pp. 39-43, 48-51 and 56.

e. City (Worcester: Migrant Press, 1961)

A stapled, printed pamphlet of 21 text pages including the ‘Preface’ by Michael Shayer. This is reprinted below.

f. Then Hallucination: City II (Worcester: Migrant Press, 1962)

A stapled, duplicated pamphlet of 9 pages containing further prose sections extracted from The Citizen and first published in Kulchur (New York) 2:6, Summer 1962. It is reprinted below. Two numbered, surviving sections, once other passages had been excerpted for the revised City, were included in The Cut Pages (London: Fulcrum Press, 1971) under the title ‘Hallucinations’ and have since appeared thus in collected editions of Fisher’s work.

g. CITY: Roy Fisher typescript (c. 1962-63)

A large unpublished typescript of 24 pages, constituting an intermediate version that foreshadows the definitive text in its choice of poems and prose sections. It also includes the paragraphs that had made up Then Hallucinations and the two poems, ‘Night Walkers’ and ‘The Judgment’, these items subsequently excluded. It is dated on internal and 9contextual evidence as c. 1962-63 and survives because a carbon copy was posted to Gael Turnbull. It is published below.

h. City in Living Arts 1 (1963)

This text is close to the definitive version, though ‘The Judgment’ and ‘Night Walkers’ are still included, and there are a number of local variants in punctuation, largely the suppression of semi-colons in favour of full stops, and some small revisions in the prose paragraphs. This is not printed here. The excluded poems are available in item g.

i. City in Collected Poems 1968 (London: Fulcrum Press, 1969)

The definitive text of City subsequently reprinted in the two volumes of Poems from Oxford University Press (1980 and 1987) as well as the Bloodaxe Books editions of The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (1996) and The Long and the Short of It (2005 and 2012). Some slight variants have crept into this text with its reprintings. Published below is the Fulcrum text.

This gathering of materials is not the first posthumous publication of work by Roy Fisher. The Flood Editions representation of A Furnace (2018) appeared after the poet’s death but had been authorised and discussed before 21 March 2017. Fisher did not authorise, and might not have authorised in his lifetime, the printing and reprinting of this book’s materials. Though unaware that The Citizen had survived, or, for that matter, of the extent of Fisher’s literary estate, I did discuss the idea of a City variorum with him while working on Slakki: New & Neglected Poems (2016). He didn’t encourage me; but nor did he exactly 10rule out such a volume. ‘The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living,’ wrote W.H. Auden of Yeats’s death, and though it is incumbent upon an editor not to modify the poet’s words, I am aware of differently inflecting some of his oeuvre by making these writings available now.

Reading this chronological arrangement of the texts from cover to cover will involve various experiences of déjà vu, for some passages, such as the opening two prose paragraphs, carry through from The Citizen to the 1969 version of City. Other poems and passages of prose appear more than once, while a large part of The Citizen and other prose passages, such the final sections of the 1961 City and Then Hallucinations, make only the one appearance. The book can be read in reverse order, tracking back from Fisher’s definitive version through the work’s intermediate stages to its sources in the separate poetry and prose. Fisher’s recording of the definitive text has been made available with this publication on the Bloodaxe website. It derives from the 1977 Nimbus recording made for an LP called City: Poetry and Prose by Roy Fisher read by the Author (Amber 7102).

The Citizen, the workbook comments, the related poems, Then Hallucinations, the two variants of City and the definitive text have been supplemented here by a selection from Fisher’s published comments on the work, excerpted by Derek Slade from interviews and occasional prose works, and a secondary bibliography of critical writings. The notes appended indicate the dates of composition and publication for the individual poems that were inserted between the prose passages in the versions of this work. These derive in their entirety from Derek Slade’s bibliography. 11 Sources are provided for the anthologised comments from Fisher’s interviews and other ancillary prose. The text of The Citizen reproduces as nearly as possible Roy Fisher’s surviving manuscript. A few misspellings have been corrected, and the presentation of direct speech has been standardised, as have a few hyphenations of compound adjectives.

For their various contributions to the assembling and editing of this book, my thanks go to Simon Collings, who transcribed The Citizen from Fisher’s manuscript notebook, to Derek Slade who made his bibliographical knowledge available once again and edited Fisher’s comments on his work, to Adam Piette and Peter Makin whose conversation helped focus the issues involved in presenting this material, to Amanda Bernstein for her conversation, enthusiasm, and work on the Fisher archive that pointed me to the large typescript, to Michael Shayer for his memories of work on the Migrant Press publication, his providing a rare copy of the original Then Hallucinations for use during this work, and permission to publish extracts from his correspondence, to Jill Turnbull for permission to quote from Gael Turnbull’s correspondence, and to Sukey Fisher for advice and permission from the Estate of Roy Fisher to publish. Lastly, my thanks go to Neil Astley and the team at Bloodaxe Books for their commitment to this project and their various expertise in helping to bring it to fruition. 12

13

INTRODUCTION

1. Circumstances and Materials

On Tuesday 4 February 1958, The Birmingham Mail published a ‘Jazz Panorama’ by Fred Norris which profiled the twenty-seven-year-old Roy Fisher, describing him as a ‘man who teaches drama by day, plays jazz piano by night, and writes self-styled off-beat poetry in whatever spare time he has left’. ‘Roy,’ he reports, ‘who lives at 224, The Broadway, Walsall, has only recently returned to the Midland jazz scene. For the last four years he has been teaching in Devon.’ This article includes a brief statement of aesthetic allegiances that sees the spare-time writer primed for what would happen over the next few years:

I have been told my poetry is ‘off-beat’ and that is how I regard it. I do not write in traditional metres. I write in free verse. Jazz is a robust music. It is creative. It is worthless trying to play jazz if you have nothing to say. The same applies to poetry. I write about the things I see, the way I see them – cities, modern life, people and their thoughts.

Returning with his wife, Barbara Venables, from Newton Abbot to his native Birmingham, Fisher had taken up a post in a teacher training college. Working by day in education and then, as later detailed in his prose memoir ‘License my Roving Hands’, travelling distances across the city at unusual hours to and from jazz-club gigs, Fisher was reacquainting himself with the place of his birth at a time of great change. From such life experiences, returned to in the ‘Introit: 12 November 1958’ to A Furnace 14(1986), emerged the two key elements – a number of independently conceived poems, and a hybrid prose text – which would go towards the collaged materials of City, an assemblage that, substantially revised, would come to be appreciated as both a decisive poetic response to this mid-century British experience of urban demolition and renewal, and also its poet’s signature work.

In a letter to his friend and fellow-poet Gael Turnbull, then based in Ventura, California, probably written during 1960, Fisher reported on recent productivity:

I have started writing like mad: an odd feeling. After so much idleness I’m sweating over four projects: – making a collection of fairly solid poems; writing a long sequence of poems on a theme; a square carnivorous novel (just begun); and a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen. This is about a quarter done; a mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography. I’m doing all this so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think. (I did say ‘like mad.’!) The evidence assembled so far is, after all, rather scanty.

The Citizen is revealed to be a work in which Fisher did give himself permission to ‘have a look at myself & see what I think’ – what he thought manifested in various strata of self-analytical marginalia. In doing so, he found both his core materials, and a range of modes for addressing them, since The Citizen contains more or less documentary accounts of alterations being wrought to Birmingham at the time, observations fed by memories of his childhood and family, a comparing and contrasting of the old city and the new one, all of these placed alongside more feverishly narrative, sexually troubled, and hallucinatory sections. There are further passages which suggest the 15piece was projected as a form of nouveau roman with a combination of remembered and imaginary characters, to which the mysterious first-person narrator (the eponymous citizen, presumably) can variously relate, along with indications of some minimal plotting and narrative. It contains some of Fisher’s most vivid writing.

The story of how this ‘sententious prose book’ became the ur-text for a hybrid collage of poetry and prose, which would eventually be seen as Fisher’s self-defining performance, has complexities of its own, ones that items in the poet’s archive, now at the University of Sheffield, have made it possible for the first time to disentangle. It had been fairly widely known, since Donald Davie drew attention to it in his chapter devoted to Fisher in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973), that City existed in two versions, a pamphlet published by Migrant Press in 1961, and the distinctly variant text with some different poems and prose passages which formed the entitled second section to the Fulcrum Press Collected Poems 1968.

Fisher’s death on 21 March 2017 and the discovery of his archive’s contents added to the picture in a number of ways. The most prominent of these was the discovery that The Citizen had indeed survived. Dated ‘November 1959’, though with some pages cut out and others partly excised, its text is preserved in a blue hardback notebook (also containing two later prose experiments, Peter Cooper and Album of Year 62, which were written in mid-1964). Further survivals included notes and attempts to shape and extend the prose text in an unlined ‘City of Birmingham Education Committee’ school exercise book with a pale grey-green soft cover, and the word Citizen inscribed on it. 16

This notebook appears to have been employed at the time the manuscript of The Citizen was heavily marked up, annotated, and partially mutilated. The entries consist in twelve pages of various numbered lists with named parts, and many unnamed (and unwritten) ones reaching as far as no. 117. The opening section, for example, which appears in both The Citizen and City, is called ‘Demolished houses at Hockley Hill’. These lists are also heavily annotated with, for instance, red biro underlines marking sections that were used as the prose paragraphs in City. The lists are followed by four and a half pages of notes-to-self, dated the 10 and 11 November 1960, which have been published below as an authorial afterword to what survives of The Citizen.

Fisher’s archive contains an undated carbon copy of ‘CITY by Roy Fisher’, a text that includes almost all of the additional prose passages called Then Hallucinations, described in handwriting on their surviving typescript as a supplement to City, and first published by Migrant Press in 1962. They would find their definitive form as ‘Hallucinations’ in The Cut Pages (1971). The archive also includes, intriguingly, the Contents page for a putative collection of poems called Starting to Make a Tree that was submitted to the Hutchinson publishing company on 2 October 1961 and, presumably, rejected.

Its significance lies in the fact that the projected collection of individual poems was assembled and submitted after the publication of the Migrant pamphlet City, which came out in June of that year (though dated May in the text). The proposed collection contains, as the title poem indicates, pieces already used in that published volume, now being presented in this putative first collection as 17stand-alone poems. The book would have contained pieces that are to be found in City, others now in the Early Poems section of Collected Poems 1968, some poems that only found print in Slakki: New & Neglected Poems (2016), and others that remain unpublished.

These materials are supplemented by the evidence in correspondence between Turnbull and Fisher held at the former’s archive at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and letters sent by Shayer to Fisher after the Migrant City had been published (the poet’s to Shayer have not survived). They are informed by telephone conversations I had with the poet while assembling Slakki during 2015 and 2016. In the light, too, of his own published comments on City assembled for this volume by Derek Slade, I offer an account of how the collage found its final form and came to have the prominence in the poet’s oeuvre that it does.

2. The Compositional Process

On 16 August 1961, after the appearance of the Migrant City, Turnbull sent Fisher his response to its publication:

My only real disappointment with it is that it isn’t LONGER – I feel very persistently that it needs more extent, a greater bulk of material – that it (especially the prose) isn’t something to be